hmm.
In the United States, we are taught about the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances”. Now, I know that it’s fashionable for Americans, and perhaps even ordinary for foreigners to be cynical of this claim.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s take the Federalist Papers at face value and assume that Madison, Hamilton and Jay really did believe in their arguments.
The basic argument in the federalist papers is that it should be possible to construct a government that could not function without the consent of interested parties. i.e, if the president started acting like a king, he’d be thwarted by senators, representatives, judges, or states who could find self interest in opposing the president’s inclination towards tyranny. Even if a sudden revolutionary impulse elected a president with a goodly number of todeys in the house, at least two thirds of the senate would owe their seats to other political considerations, to say nothing of judges who were appointed by previous presidents and confirmed by previous senates.
similarly, a representative from Boston would owe his seat to voters who thought differently from slavers in Virginia, who would elect their own representative.
Theoretically, all these disparate interests groups would have to cooperate in order to seriously change the nature of government, and it would have to be public debate, and many people would have incentives to take a stand…
So, the constitution should be designed around this principle-- that every power should be allocated or attenuated in order to promote political debate and punish the accumulation of unilateral power. And figuring how to do this depends on a model of how humans acquire and manipulate political power.
but if you compare the warpowers as described by the federalist papers (two year army, declaration of war reserved to congress) with the war powers as they exist today…
there’s sort of a failure of “hamilton madison and jay”'s model of how the world really works. The goal is to harness political greed for useful ends, but how useful is a model that assumes that the House of Representatives will have constant turnover?
Similarly, if the goal of the FDA is to promote the production of safe, useful and effective drugs, and instead companies are cheating, or producing drugs of dubious medical value, perhaps the regulatory system needs to be altered to better serve the FDA’s purposes, in light of what we now know of corporate behavior.
